CE credits: 1Exam items: 10

Learning objectives: After completing this course participants
will be able to:

1. Understand the opportunities and challenges of Facebook
research.

2. Learn practical ways to conduct research on Facebook.

3. Understand the ethical considerations of such research.

Facebook has become a significant part of daily life for nearly 1. 4 billion people worldwide. While many researchers have explored Facebook’s influence on
individuals and societies, its potential as a powerful research
tool has been largely overlooked.

Access to the large and diverse samples offered by Facebook
could help to address a major challenge in social science: its
overreliance on samples that are relatively small, student and
WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and
democratic). Furthermore, Facebook can be used to circumvent
the limitations of self-reports and laboratory-based studies by
providing access to records of actual behavior expressed in a
natural environment.

In this article, we review the opportunities and challenges
of Facebook research; provide a number of practical
recommendations for effectively conducting research within
this environment; and discuss several ethical considerations.
We hope to convince the reader that using Facebook in research
generally produces robust results and can be as easy as posting
an advertisement on Facebook or adding a “Log in with
Facebook” button to an online survey.

Part #1: Recruiting participants

While the Facebook population is not perfectly representative
since its users tend to be younger and better educated than
the general population, its sheer size implies that even
underrepresented groups are relatively large. For example, as of
2014, nearly 35 percent of Americans over 65 years of age were
on Facebook, and their number was quickly growing.

One of the least expensive and most efficient ways to dip
into Facebook’s participant pool is by snowball sampling:
convincing Facebook users to recruit their friends to join
a study. If enough participants do so, the positive feedback
loop may lead to self-sustaining studies with a rapid growth
in sample size. In order to go viral, a study must be engaging
to its participants (such as by including a game or offering
compelling feedback) and must integrate the invitation of
friends as a core part of the experience. A recent myPersonality
study, for example, offered a 360-degree assessment feature,
encouraging participants to invite friends to judge their
personality. This study, originally shared with the author’s 150
Facebook friends, went viral and attracted over six million
participants in four years.

Advantages of snowball sampling include low costs and large
sample sizes. One of the downsides is that the first participants
are likely to disproportionately affect the composition of the
sample, since people tend to interact with those similar to
themselves. Furthermore, people with many friends are more
likely to be recruited into the sample. ( The size and diversity of
the Facebook population can certainly help to minimize this
disadvantage; given enough participants, the representativeness
of the population can be improved by weighting.)

An effective alternative to snowball sampling is offered by
targeted advertising. The Facebook advertising platform can be
used to target audiences defined by a wide range of preferences
(such as liking “getting up early in the morning”); behaviors
(liking “running”); and demographic variables including
location, education, language, political views, ethnicity, sexual
orientation, income and many more. This approach can be used
to obtain representative samples or reach “rare” participants,
such as those stigmatized in the offline world or those who are
hesitant to meet researchers face-to-face.

Research shows that Facebook advertising reduces the costs
of targeted participant recruitment. Not only did Facebook ads
outperform traditional methods, such as postal surveys, but
they are also more cost-efficient than Google advertising, online
newsletters and emails. In 10 recent studies using Facebook
advertising, the average cost per participant was $13.75.

Furthermore, Facebook can be used to remain in contact
with ex-participants. For example, over 150,000 people
subscribed to the myPersonality project’s Facebook page over
the years. Their comments provided the authors with invaluable
feedback on the design of and issues with the studies. Also,
messages published on the project’s page attracted considerable
attention — in a few hours, it was possible to recruit tens of

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